Nairobi

In front of a supermarket on Monrovia Street, two men sit on crates. Women and men busily walk up the stairs to the shopping centre; others leave it and take the stairs down to the street, fanning out towards Moi Avenue or Uhuru Highway.

At least five taxi drivers attempt to make passengers of the people loaded down with shopping. A ride inside the city costs 300 Kenyan shillings or about three euros.

The two men sit patiently on their crates, completely unimpressed by the commotion. Two other men are seated a bit higher on higher crates. They are working, brushing, colouring, examining and polishing the shoes of the waiting men. These men are not conspicuously elegantly dressed; one in a suit and shirt, the other in trousers and a long-sleeved t-shirt that is a bit frayed on the left sleeve. Now, a few coins change owners, the men stand up and walk away in their shiny shoes: tall and self-confident.

The shiny shoes of Nairobi are a phenomenon, at least for the guest from Europe. For the people here, they are taken for granted. “Why does everyone here have clean shoes? I never thought about it,” says businesswoman and fashion designer Carol Wahome. Her colleague Wambui Njogi briefly ponders. “If you went to school with dirty shoes, you would get a beating, remember, Carol?” Carol nods. “Even if you come from the slums, before you enter the city you clean your shoes. That’s the way it is.” She never thought about it, says Carol Wahome, but that’s exactly the way it is. “It’s a kind of dignity,” says Wambui Njogi. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first Kenyans went to Europe to study. “And they adopted the European lifestyle,” says Carol Wahome reflectively. Change came relatively quickly. A person left home to study “and made more far-reaching plans than to continue to live the traditional way.” Even the son of a farmer would not continue to run the farm as his father did before him. “Shoes were a part of all that,” explains Carol Wahome, “they were not African. And then they were a symbol of progress.” In the truest sense of the word. “Shoes are a value,” says Wambui Njogi.

In a country where 40 percent of the population has to make do with less than one euro per day, whoever has shoes takes care of them and keeps them shining. The next customers have already taken their places at the shoe shiners in front of the supermarket on Monrovia Street. Full of dignity.

Swahili of the Day: Viatu means shoes.